Dick Wittink Receives Paul E. Green Award For Landmark Marketing Study on Brand Switching

New Haven, Conn.-May 12, 2004- Dick R. Wittink, the George Rogers Clark Professor of Management and Marketing at the Yale School of Management, is the recipient of the Paul E. Green Award 2004 for his paper "Is 75% of the Sales Promotion Bump Due to Brand Switching? No, Only 33% Is" with Harald J. van Heerde (Tilburg University) and Sachin Gupta (Johnson Graduate School of Management, Cornell University).

The Paul E.Green Award is given annually by the Journal of Marketing Research. It recognizes the article published during the previous year in JMR that "demonstrates the most potential to contribute significantly to the practice of marketing research and research in marketing." It honors the S.S Kresge Professor Emeritus of Marketing at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.

The paper was published in the November 2003 issue of the Journal of Marketing Research. The authors examine what portion of the unit sales increase that results from a temporary price cut of a product is due to brand switching. Their findings show that on average 33 percent of the unit sales increase is attributable to brand switching. The remainder of the sales increase is due to stockpiling, store switching, category expansion and other sources. For the last fifteen years, the prevailing belief in the literature had been that on average 75 percent of the sales effect was due to brand switching.

The decomposition of temporary sales increases into its constituent sources is critical for managers to determine profitability of promotions. The authors speculate that category expansion is more valuable than brand switching if competitive reactions are much more likely to occur within product categories than between categories.

The award will be presented to Wittink and his co-authors at the 2004 Summer Marketing Educators' Conference in Boston, MA, August 6 - 9, 2004.

Wittink is editor of the Journal of Marketing Research. This paper was accepted by the previous editor.

Media contact: Tabitha Wilde, Associate Director of Media Relations: 203-432-6010; tabitha.wilde@yale.edu.